A preclinical study from Duke University researchers suggests that the effectiveness of an experimental approach to limiting stroke-related brain injury may depend not only on the drug itself, but also on the brain’s collateral circulation: the network of small “backup” blood vessels that can help sustain tissue when a major artery is blocked.

ATP-induced cell death (AICD) is an operational conceptual framework describing the associations between pathological extracellular ATP accumulation, excessive purinergic stimulation, disrupted ATP homeostasis and diverse cell-death outcomes. This review summarizes recent evidence on the molecular mechanisms of AICD, including extracellular ATP–purinergic receptor signaling, ionic and membrane disturbances, inflammasome and caspase activation, mitochondrial dysfunction, redox imbalance, and the context-dependent convergence of these pathways on multiple forms of cell death. The directness and strength of gene-level evidence are also assessed using an ordinal evidence-grading framework that classifies the evidence for the 38 AICD-Core genes as direct experimental, indirect, context-dependent, mechanistically supportive, or currently insufficient. These mechanistic analyses, as well as gene-level analyses, are discussed in relation to the existing datasets in ATPexGen, which contains 38 AICD-Core and 216 AICD-Extended genes and provides a searchable and downloadable resource for the field of AICD research. The review also addresses gaps in current evidence, limitations of curation processes, and priorities for experimental validation and database development moving forward.

Researchers have developed SuSha, a multi-model ensemble learning tool that predicts a microorganism's salt tolerance directly from its genome. Trained on the amino acid composition of 123 bacterial and archaeal species and validated on 2,678 metagenomes from freshwater, marine, and hypersaline habitats worldwide, SuSha achieved over 90% accuracy for extreme halophiles. It offers a powerful way to study the more than 81% of microbes that cannot be cultured in the lab.

For the first time, researchers have shown that ketamine activates two separate mechanisms in the brain, one for pain relief and another for altering the state of consciousness.

The findings may help in developing treatments that provide the benefits of ketamine while reducing its psychological side effects.